Top Psychology Quotes

Favorite Psychology Quotes

1. "Many of the pains and efforts taken to deal with the contemporary marriage are dominated by considerations of well-being, happiness, and biology. This corresponds to the position of contemporary psychology, which distinguishes itself through a deep skepticism amounting to a rejection of anything transcendent."Author: Adolf Guggenbhuhl Craig

2. "Physics says: go to sleep. Of courseyou're tired. Every atom in youhas been dancing the shimmy in silver shoesnonstop from mitosis to now.Quit tapping your feet. They'll danceinside themselves without you. Go to sleep.Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inchby inch America is giving itselfto the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darknesslap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.You aren't alone. All of the continents used to beone body. You aren't alone. Go to sleep.Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,Psychology says: but first it has to be night, soBiology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over townandHistory says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down."Author: Albert Goldbarth

3. "In Astrology, the moon, among its other meanings, has that of "the common people," who submit (they know not why) to any independent will that can express itself with sufficient energy. The people who guillotined the mild Louis XVI died gladly for Napoleon. The impossibility of an actual democracy is due to this fact of mob-psychology. As soon as you group men, they lose their personalities. A parliament of the wisest and strongest men in the nation is liable to behave like a set of schoolboys, tearing up their desks and throwing their inkpots at each other. The only possibility of co-operation lies in discipline and autocracy, which men have sometimes established in the name of equal rights."Author: Aleister Crowley

4. "I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them."Author: Alison Gopnik

5. "You could tell them why they should hire you so very much better than I could. But they won't listen to you and they'll listen to me. Because I'm the middleman. The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line--it's a middleman. And the more middlemen, the shorter. Such is the psychology of a pretzel."Author: Ayn Rand

6. "The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology."Author: Basil Bunting

7. "In Psychology we deal with minds and their processes, and leave out of account as far as possible the objects that we get to know by means of them."Author: Charles D. Broad

8. "In all the sciences except Psychology we deal with objects and their changes, and leave out of account as far as possible the mind which observes them."Author: Charles D. Broad

9. "His bedroom was a reflection of Bryant's mind, its untidy shelves filled with games and puzzles stacked in ancient boxes, statues and mementoes competing for space with books on every subject imaginable, from Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology to Illustrated British Ballads and A History of Indian Philosophy. "What are you reading at the moment?' asked May. "Batman," said Bryant. "The drawings are terribly good."Author: Christopher Fowler

10. "Children are defenseless to the ‘virus of dualism' in whatever form it comes in - which is why [religious ideas] should not be introduced until [children reach] a cognitive age. Religious indoctrination is not required to raise healthy children. Their imagination should be nourished… but not invalidated or shamed. [The result can] be a neurosis, which I believe, is why [people] go to religion and metaphysics when they get older... In the best scenario, children would grow through their imagination into creative adults in an environment that is based on current psychology and a science-based education."Author: Christopher Loren

11. "I fantasized about being a psychology major when I first started school, and I took a handful of Psych 101 classes."Author: Claire Danes

12. "While much psychology emphasizes the familial causes of angst in humans, the cultural component carries as much weight, for culture is the family of the family. If the family of the family has various sicknesses, then all families within that culture will have to struggle with the same malaises. There is a saying cultura cura, culture cures. If the culture is a healer, the families learn how to heal; they will struggle less, be more reparative, far less wounding, far more graceful and loving. In a culture where the predator rules, all new life needing to be born, all old life needing to be gone, is unable to move and the soul-lives of its citizenry are frozen with both fear and spiritual famine."Author: Clarissa Pinkola Estés

13. "Economics is half psychology and half Grade Three arithmetic, and the U.S. does not now have either half right."Author: Conrad Black

14. "Psychobabble attempts to redefine the entire English language just to make a correct statement incorrect. Psychology is the study of why someone would try to do this."Author: Criss Jami

15. "I think I really like psychology because my job is all about getting inside another person's mind and thoughts."Author: Dakota Fanning

16. "But man is an odd, sad creature as yet, intent on pilfering the earth, and heedless of the growths within himself. He cannot be bored about psychology. He leaves it to the specialist, which is as if he should leave his dinner to be eaten by a steam-engine. He cannot be bothered to digest his own soul."Author: E.M. Forster

17. "The restriction of studies of human intellect and character to studies of conscious states was not without influence on a scientific studies of animal psychology."Author: Edward Thorndike

18. "Knowing that Draco's hopeful face had probably been drilled into him by months of practice did not make it any less effective, Harry observed. Actually it did make it less effective, but unfortunately not ineffective. The same could be said of Draco's clever use of reciprocation pressure for an unsolicited gift, a technique which Harry had read about in his social psychology books (one experiment had shown that an unconditional gift of $5 was twice as effective as a conditional offer of $50 in getting people to fill out surveys). Draco had made an unsolicited gift of a confidence, and now invited Harry to offer a confidence in return... and the thing was, Harry did feel pressured. Refusal, Harry was certain, would be met with a look of sad disappointment, and maybe a small amount of contempt indicating that Harry had lost points."Author: Eliezer Yudkowsky

19. "We're not excusing the ones who are mean, but I want girls to understand the psychology. It's not in everyone. But the bully needs to put this pain somewhere."Author: Elizabeth Berkley

20. "The idea that our mental life is affected by hidden causes is a mainstay of psychology."Author: Gary Wolf

21. "Since the early 1920s a unique spiritual path has existed in Japan. This distinctly Japanese version of yoga is called Shin-shin-toitsu-do, and it combines seated meditation, moving meditation, breathing exercises, and other disciplines to help practitioners realize unification of mind and body. Besides yoga, it is a synthesis of methods, influenced by Japanese meditation, healing arts, and martial arts; along with Western psychology, medicine, and science. Shin-shin-toitsu-do is widely practiced throughout Japan, although it is almost unknown in other countries. Through its principles of mind and body coordination people have an opportunity to realize their full potential in everyday life.A remarkable man created this path, and he led an equally remarkable life. He was known in Japan as Nakamura Tempu Sensei, and this is his story."Author: H. E. Davey

22. "In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary."Author: Harold Bloom

23. "When believers have a low view of God, everything focuses on meeting felt needs within the body of Christ. When the church adopts such a perspective, it often offers people nothing more than spiritual placebos. It centers on psychology, self-esteem, entertainment, and a myriad of other diversions to attempt to meet perceived and felt needs."Author: John F. MacArthur Jr.

24. "If anybody studying psychology wants a concrete example of what a narcissist looks like, I advise them to consider any man who cheats on his wife. These guys are the textbook me-firsters, the ones who think the rules don't apply to them, the ones who tell themselves as long as she doesn't know, there's no harm done. No woman needs to sleep with these guys. There are so many single self-absorbed narcissists who will fuck you poorly."Author: Julie Klausner

25. "Psychology doesn't like to talk about evil. It likes to talk about bad childhoods. But I very much believe that some people are evil and motivation is not necessary for evil."Author: Laura Schlessinger

26. "Psychology which explains everything explains nothing, and we are still in doubt."Author: Marianne Moore

27. "My brother is nine years older than I am. He's a psychology professor, I'm an actor, and so we look at life in two different ways. We thought it would be interesting to come together and take our unique perspectives and share them with everybody else."Author: Matt Czuchry

28. "A handful of experiences when I was small have made me a confirmed nonathlete. In psychology (okay, Twilight) they teach you about the notion of imprinting, and I think it applies here. I reverse-imprinted with athleticism. Ours is the great non-love story of my life." — Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (and other concerns)"Author: Mindy Kaling

29. "Psychology is as important as substance. If you treat people with respect, they will go out of their way to accommodate you. If you treat them in a patronizing way, they will go out of their way to make your life difficult."Author: Mohamed ElBaradei

30. "I couldn't sleep for two years, they tried to break my nerves. They used a lot of psychology to brainwash."Author: Mordechai Vanunu

31. "Psychology researchers now claim that it is important for babies to learn how to stop crying by themselves. Fortunately, many parents still prefer to comfort their babies. If they didn't, we might find ourselves living in a society of very solitary people, who had learned to control thier distress rather than to find strength through sharing it."Author: Naomi Stadlen

33. "Psychology is in its infancy, as a science. I hope, in the interests of Art, it will always remain so."Author: Oscar Wilde

34. "Man is a machine which reacts blindly to external forces and, this being so, he has no will, and very little control of himself, if any at all. What we have to study, therefore, is not psychology-for that applies only to a developed man-but mechanics. Man is not only a machine but a machine which works very much below the standard it would be capable of maintaining if it were working properly."Author: P.D. Ouspensky

35. "I almost got a psychology degree, I almost got a philosophy degree. I kept changing it so they couldn't make me graduate. I studied anthropology and eastern religion, epistomology, and astronomy... I took every interesting course I could find for nine years."Author: Patrick Rothfuss

36. "Because of the womb being a central phenomenon in the feminine body, the whole psychology of woman differs: she is non-aggressive, non-inquiring, non-questioning, non-doubting, because all of those things are part of aggression. She will not take the initiative; she simply waits - and she can wait infinitely."Author: Rajneesh

38. "There was a Princess Somebody of Denmark sitting at a table with a number of people around her, and I saw an empty chair at their table and sat down.She turned to me and said, "Oh! You're one of the Nobel-Prize-winners. In what field did you do your work?""In physics," I said."Oh. Well, nobody knows anything about that, so I guess we can't talk about it.""On the contrary," I answered. "It's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics. It's the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance--gold transfers we can't talk about, because those are understood--so it's the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!"I don't know how they do it. There's a way of forming ice on the surface of the face, and she did it!"Author: Richard P. Feynman

39. "Successful long term relationships are all about power levels. A high power level male will attract and succeed with a high level power female.How do we define those power levels? We can't, they are inherently in us, and invisible to scientists, accountants, psychologists and spiritualists alike. None can explain the Universe in its entirety, and it is more than chemistry, biology, physics, genetics, horoscopes, religion, in-laws, fame, psychology and spirituality.We may be infatuated by a person, but as soon as we hold their hands, kiss their lips, and especially, make love or have sex with them, their power levels will be instantly exposed."Author: Robert Black

40. "Such being the nature of mental life, the business of psychology is primarily to describe in detail the various forms which attention or conation assumes upon the different levels of that life."Author: Samuel Alexander

41. "The past is not another country; it is another life. The texture of daily living is different now than in the past, more different the further back we look, until we find people whose experiences created a psychology we might find baffling or rude. Many details that once made up the daily round are lost to us because people considered them too trivial to write down. Knowing the past means knowing what people carried in their pockets, what they did with their sewage, where their dogs slept. Those details may seem unimportant, but what they convey is not."Author: Scott Herring

42. "My first undertaking in the way of scientific experiment was in the field of economics and psychology."Author: Simon Newcomb

43. "One thing on psychology, which we've always known, is that every investor says they're long-term - and they are until the market takes a hit."Author: Steve Forbes

44. "My fear represented the failure of the human system. It is a sad truth of our creation: Something is amiss in our design, there are loose ends of our psychology that are simply not wrapped up. My fears were the dirty secrets of evolution. They were not provided for, and I was forced to construct elaborate temples to house them."Author: Steve Martin

45. "Questioning our own motives, and our own process, is critical to a skeptical and scientific outlook. We must realize that the default mode of human psychology is to grab onto comforting beliefs for purely emotional reasons, and then justify those beliefs to ourselves with post-hoc rationalizations." - Steven Novella"Author: Steven Novella

46. "Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology."Author: Steven Pinker

47. "Well, my parents originally wanted me to become a doctor - that's why I was in school; I was pre-med, and I graduated with a degree in psychology and a concentration in neuroscience. Really, the plan was for me to go to med school."Author: Steven Yeun

48. "I learned much more about acting from philosophy courses, psychology courses, history and anthropology than I ever learned in acting class."Author: Tim Robbins

49. "The materialistic point of view in psychology can claim, at best, only the value of an heuristic hypothesis."Author: Wilhelm Wundt

50. "In my psychology class, I learned that bettors are more confident about the horses they pick after they place their bets."Author: Will McIntosh

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Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 36 As it is written: "For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered." 37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Author: Anonymous